Have you ever seen a waterfall?
It truly is incredible to see thousands of gallons of water flowing with the kind of force and energy powerful enough to light up an entire city.
It’s even more amazing when you consider that even the mightiest waterfall you’ve ever seen started with a single, slow and steady flow of water.
The magic happens when several of these slow and steady flows or “channels” of water converge to become one big flow, which eventually spills over a cliff to become a waterfall.
It is the sum of several much smaller flows of water, that come together to create a powerful and unstoppable torrent.
It’s similar to effective book promotion.
Promoting your brand and book through a single channel such as your blog or author website is a solid foundation and the best place to start.
But to really reap the rewards of vigorous book sales and more exposure for your brand, having a multi-pronged approach to marketing and promotion is even better.
Multi-channel marketing is the key to creating several opportunities for you to connect with your prospects. It’s the ultimate form of leverage.
Instead of struggling to develop strong sales numbers with a single method of book promotion, utilize several different marketing mediums at once and connect with the biggest audience possible.
What is Multi-Channel Marketing?
Multi-channel marketing is defined as “the practice of engaging prospects, leads and customers across a combination of indirect and direct communication channels”.
The definition goes on further to say that a “channel” can be one of several things – a device, a medium or a network.
Examples include:
- Google search
- Offline events
- Webinars
- YouTube
- Physical storefront
- Pay per click (PPC)
- Apps
- Website/Blog
Your prospects and potential customers are everywhere. So, it makes perfect sense that for you to connect with as many of them as possible, your marketing plan should be as diverse as your future customer base.
Benefits of Multi-Channel Marketing
There are many benefits of using multi-channel marketing as a part of your book launch strategy, but the most important are:
- Increased Brand Awareness
People can’t buy from a seller they don’t know about.
With multi-channel marketing, your brand gets exposed to many more potential customers who become aware that you have a book offer that can solve their problems or provide the entertainment they want.
- Better Product Visibility
Another key benefit of multi-channel book promotion is that your prospects get to know more about your entire catalog of book offers so they can quickly figure out which ones are a good fit for them.
- More Opportunities to Buy Your Book
Studies show that very few people purchase products or services on their first contact with a seller.
It typically takes between 6 and 8 “touches” before a prospect is aware of your brand, and several more before they’re ready to pull out their wallet and buy.
Multi-channel marketing is effective, because it gives you several opportunities to start conversations with your audience in a way that says “I’m here to help”, which often leads to a sale.
Multi-Channel Book Promotion Ideas
Your biggest ally in the quest to attract and main a significant group of prospects that you can sell to time and again is your list. However, if email marketing is the only channel you use to nurture leads you could be leaving a lot of money on the table.
Remember that it’s easier to sell to an existing customer than it is to sell to someone brand new. Use this fact to your advantage to build your multi-channel marketing strategy using the following simple ideas.
- Focus on A Handful of Effective Channels
Depending on the types of books you publish, there are certain channels that will be more effective for you than others.
Don’t waste time and energy trying to use every single marketing channel available to promote your books and brand. Based on the Pareto principle, you can expect to get about 80 percent of your audience from approximately 20 percent of your marketing channels.
Use this information to hone in on the channels that are most effective for reaching your specific audience.
You want to put your focus, resources and time into creating high-converting marketing messages and delivering them to the right prospects at the right times. This moves you from making no sales, to brisk sales in the shortest time possible.
- Categorize Your Prospects
A simple way to increase the results from your multi-channel marketing efforts is to group your prospects into different categories based on previous interactions with your brand. That way, you can deliver more of what they actually want, instead of exposing them to things they aren’t likely to pay attention to and buy.
For example, let’s say you self-publish books in two different niches, organization and cooking. Chances are, that someone who is thinking about cleaning out their closet isn’t also focused on learning how to make pizza at home.
By grouping your prospects into separate categories based on their interests your marketing messages become clearer and more effective in moving the target closer to making a purchase.
- Do Cross-Channel Promotion
Cross-channel promotion is a great way to leverage a campaign that focuses on a single offer spread across several different channels.
So, for example, in your “cookbook” niche, you could create a short video showing the preparation of a dish from your book and post it on YouTube. Next, you could take a picture of the finished dish and put it up on Instagram. Finally, you could post reviews from people who have tried and loved your recipe on Facebook.
Each one of the promotions link to each other and link back to your sales page so that new prospects can follow the trail and eventually make their own purchase.
- Test, Test and Test Some More
Once you’ve implemented your multi-channel marketing strategy, one of the most important things to do to ensure success is to keep testing your methods in order to improve their effectiveness.
Experiment with A/B testing and use the results to figure out a few specific things.
What aspect of your promotion generated the most interest? What kind of copy did people respond to the most? At what stage of the promotion did prospects decide to click and make a purchase?
Testing also helps you to weed out poor-performing channels and use positive results to find additional channels to replicate success.
Multiple-Channel Book Promotion is Relationship Building
Multi-channel book promotion is great for boosting brand awareness, but the true power of it lies in promoting your books to existing customers. It’s one of the simplest forms of relationship building that adds value over time.
Today, consumers exhibit very different behaviors than they did just a few years ago.
They no longer respond to marketing that’s based on claims of being “the best” and having the “lowest prices”. All your prospects really want to know is, “What’s in it for me?”.
They want solutions to their problems.
Multi-channel book promotion gives you several chances to tell your audience exactly what’s in it for them along with giving you a better understanding of what your prospects do and don’t respond to.
The data you collect over time, helps to make your overall marketing strategy more effective as you test, streamline and perfect your methods.
Create your own multi-channel marketing plan today and watch as you quickly generate your own “waterfall” of paying customers.
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